Мелисса де ла Круз - Masquerade

PATIENT RECORD St. Dymphna Home for the Insane Name: Margaret Stanford Age: 16 Admitted: April 5, 1869 PREVIOUS HISTORY: Recommended isolation therapy, April 30, 1869 Patient unresponsive. Isolation therapy no longer recommended, May 23, 1869.

Patient continues to have delirium, delusion, nightmares.

Suicidal tendencies more pronounced.

Patient is violent, danger to self and to others. Recommend transfer to full-security facility.

PRESENT CONDITION: A week before patient was to be transferred, patient started responding to treatment. Patient stayed and was allowed to remain in our facility for several weeks, in which no signs of delusion, hysteria, or dementia were observed. Patient responds well to questions and appears to have fully recovered. Recommend release to family in three months if progress continues.

THIRTY-ONE

Every Valentine's Day, the student council sponsored a holiday fundraiser by selling roses that would be delivered in class. The roses came in four colors: white, yellow, red, and pink, and the subtleties of their meaning were parsed and analyzed by the female population to no end.

Mimi had always understood it thus: white for love, yellow for friendship, red for passion, and pink for a secret crush. Every year on Valentine's Day, Mimi was the recipient of the biggest and most elaborate bouquets. One of her human familiars had once bought five dozen red roses to declare his undying devotion.

Mimi perched on her stool in Chem lab, her first class that morning, and waited for the floral tidal wave.

The student council flunkies arrived with their buckets of flowers. "Happy Valentine's Day!" they chirped to a harried Mr. Korgan.

"Go ahead, get it over with," he complained.

Many of the girls received several small bouquets—most were yellow roses, which meant the girls had spent their money on each other, in the way girls do to make themselves feel better about not having a Valentine on that holiest of holidays.

Schuyler, sitting at her usual table—they had rotated around so that she was back with Oliver again—accepted a pretty yellow bouquet. Oliver had sent her one last year as well, and sure enough, the accompanying card had his precise handwriting on it.

"Thanks, Ollie," she smiled, inhaling the fresh blooms. "And here's one for you, Mr.

Hazard-Perry," the freshman delivery girl said, handing him a bouquet of pink roses. Oliver colored. "Pink?”

"A secret crush!" Schuyler teased. She had decided to send him the pink flowers since they always traded yellow roses, and it was getting too predictable. Why not spice it up a little.

"Ha. Right. I know they're just from you, Sky," Oliver said, plucking the card from the top. He read it aloud: "Oliver, will you be my secret valentine? Love, Sky." He placed it back in the envelope and couldn't look at Schuyler for a moment.

Schuyler wanted to peer inside his mind. She had been successful in accomplishing the first factor of the glom-telepathy—but Oliver had been taking lessons as well, and as soon as he had mastered the antidote to telepathy—occludo, which meant closing your mind to external influence—Schuyler couldn't get a read on him anymore.

Bliss, who was sitting with Kingsley, received two red bouquets of similar size. "Ah, I have a rival I see," Kingsley drawled.

"It's nothing. It's just from some guy I don't even know that well," Bliss mumbled. Sure enough, the second bouquet was from Morgan, who had ordered the flowers all the way from his dorm room in Rhode Island.

"You are always on my mind. Love, M." his card read.

Kingsley handed his bouquet to her personally. "I wish these were green, they would suit you better. The color clashes with your hair.”

"It's fine," Bliss muttered. She still didn't know how she felt about Kingsley. Being with him seemed like a betrayal to Dylan's memory.

Having handed out all the middle-size bouquets, the floral messengers were now bringing out the big guns. The three or four dozen mega-arrangements, roses of the deepest scarlet, all of which seemed to have Mimi Force's name on their cards. Soon, the area around her desk looked like a funeral parlor.

"Looks like that's it," Mr. Korgan grumbled.

"Wait we have one left," the runner said, bringing out what was surely the most expensive bouquet of all: a three-foot-tall arrangement of two hundred white roses, in the palest ivory color.

All the girls swooned. Almost no boys bought white roses ever. It was too big a sign of commitment. But this one practically trumpeted a captured heart.

The runner set the bouquet in front of Schuyler.

Mimi raised an eyebrow. She had always won the roses lottery. What was this all about?

"For me?" Schuyler asked, awestruck by the size of the thing.

She took the card from the tallest stem.

"For Schuyler, who doesn't like love stories." It was not signed.

Mimi glared at her red bouquets; the flowers seemed to wilt a little at her stare. She didn't have to guess who had sent the dazzling white flowers to the little beast. White for light. White for love. White for forever.

The time for her plan was at hand.

When she walked by Schuyler's desk, she pretended to trip, and caught a strand of Schuyler's dark hair under her fingertips as she steadied herself on Schuyler's chair.

"Ouch!" Schuyler yelped.

"Watch it," Mimi sniffed, the strand of hair securely in hand.

It wouldn't be long now.

THIRTY-TWO

After mastering the first principle of the glom, Schuyler had moved on to the second principle: suggestion. The second tenet was the ability to plant a seed of an idea in another mind.

"It is how we push the Red Bloods to strive for excellence, art, and beauty," her grandfather revealed. "We use the suggestion. It is a useful tool. Most people don't like to think their ideas are not theirs, so we suggest them instead. If we did not, the humans would have never had the New Deal, Social Security, or even Lincoln Center.”

Suggestion was even more complicated than telepathy. Lawrence explained that one had to do it subtly, so the human would not feel as if they were being manipulated. "Subliminal advertising was invented by one of our kind, of course, but when the Red Bloods discovered it, they immediately forbade its use. A pity.”

The night before, Lawrence had asked her to suggest something to Anderson. After several hours of Schuyler attempting to not only find the target signal, but to send something to it, Anderson suddenly stood up and said that he felt like a cup of tea, and did anyone else want one?

When he left, Lawrence looked over at his granddaughter.

"That was you, wasn't it?”

Schuyler nodded. It had taken almost all of her strength to send one simple request.

"Good. Tomorrow we will move from afternoon delicacies to more important matters.”

The next day at school, the effort it had taken to perform the suggestion took its toll on Schuyler. As she walked down the back hallways after third period, she suddenly began to feel woozy. She swooned and would have tumbled down the back stairs, had Jack Force not been there to catch her.

"Hold on," he said. “Are you okay?”

Schuyler opened her eyes. Jack was looking at her, concerned.

"I just lost my footing…I fainted.”

The girls on the stairway behind her exchanged knowing smiles. Fainting was a regular occurrence at the school, and a telltale sign of anorexia. Of course Schuyler Van Alen was suffering from an eating disorder. Everyone could tell the bitch was too skinny.

"Let me take you home," Jack said, lifting her to her feet.

"No—Oliver—my Conduit—he can…and really, it's nothing, just I've been working too hard on the glom," she said, half delirious.